Alcohol abuse and alcoholism and their consequences are considered by many Nations to be their most serious health problem. Proven methods for treating and preventing alcohol abuse and alcoholism have not been found to date. Any treatment method which ameliorated the effects of alcohol abuse and/or alcoholism would be beneficial.
Attempts have been made to develop pharmaceutical agents to treat alcohol abuse and alcoholism. For instance, the approach of using an agent which would cause nausea upon the event of alcohol consumption has been discussed and attempted. These agents, however, have not been shown to be clinically effective in well-controlled clinical trials.
Another approach has been premised on the notion that alcohol abuse and alcoholism are manifestations of anxiety and/or depression and have attempted to treat alcohol abuse or alcoholism with pharmocotherapies used in treating severe anxiety and/or depression. Generally, these treatments, and particularly antianxiety medications, have not been found to be clinically effective in well-controlled clinical trials.
Another approach is premised on the notion that specific pharmaceutical agents might modify the motivation for drinking alcohol. In effect, this approach requires a pharmaceutical agent which changes the patient's appetite for alcoholic beverages. This allows for the possibility that a subject's propensity to drink excessively can be modified even during the course of drinking. By decreasing motivation to drink, such agents would be particularly helpful in preventing relapse back into periods of excessive drinking following a period of abstinence. This approach is consistent with the observations that alcohol abuse and alcoholism tends to run in natural families (this has lead to the suggestion that alcoholism might involve specific, inheritable, neurochemistries). If this is the case, then, pharmaceutical agents may be able to effectively alter this specific neurochemistry in order to decrease the propensity to take excessive amounts of alcoholic beverages which is the essence of alcohol addictive behavior. There are events in the history of an individual that may also lead to states that might be similar to those that are characteristic of persons who inherit a risk for alcoholism. It follows that pharmaceutical agents will be useful in a variety of circumstances where the salient problem is propensity to drink alcoholic beverages extensively.
The idea that a pharmaceutical agent might be an effective therapy for alcohol abuse and alcoholism is supported by a number of recent observations. Maltrexone, for example, is an agent that reduces laboratory animal's drinking of alcoholic beverages and has recently been shown to be an effective pharmaceutical adjunct to other treatments for alcohol abuse and alcoholism. The modification of certain physiological processes, such as those associated with the renin-angiotensin system, have been shown, as another example, to modify the propensity to consume alcohol in laboratory rats. The accumulated data indicate that drugs might be useful in treating alcoholism and, further, that testing with laboratory animals is a useful means for determining what pharmaceutical agents may be useful as treatments for, or as adjuncts to other treatments for, alcohol abuse and alcoholism. Tests with animals predict what agents will be useful and will not be useful in changing or lowering the consumption of alcoholic beverages in people.
Alcohol abuse and alcoholism have been variously labelled. Some modern usage, for example, calls alcoholism alcohol dependence. What is characteristic, however, of all the conditions for which we seek better treatments is that they are characterized by excessive intake of alcoholic beverages over an extended period of time.
The inventor has found that a class of pharmaceutical agents effectively modifies the propensity of laboratory animals to consume alcohol and, therefore, constitutes a class of agents which have utility as treatments for alcohol abuse, alcoholism and/or alcohol dependence and similar conditions manifest as extensive, problematic use of alcoholic beverages. These agents are the alpha-2 adrenergic antagonists (often called alpha-2 adrenoceptor antagonists or simply alpha-2 antagonists).